The personal blog of Mark J Daniels, mostly about his new hobby playing with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles.

Five years. And counting…

July 21st, 1969 – most people will remember that as the day that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first men to walk on the moon.*

Exactly one year before that, Arnold Palmer became the first golfer to earn a million dollars.*

On the same date but in 1873, Jesse James and his men commit their first train robbery.*

This, and so much more, happened on this date in history, but none stand in my memory as much as this date five years ago today.

Standing outside The Tharp Arms in blazing sun at 9:00am on Thursday 21st July 2005 I looked at Ali and asked: “are we doing the right thing?”

She simply looked back at me and said: “since when have you seen a publican driving around in a rubbish car?”

Well, we’ve learned a bit since then, obviously. Not to mention having written off two cars in that time, spent nearly £2’000 repairing the cylinder head on another, and purchased a Renault Vel Satis that spent each day of its life trying to kill me.

Her rhetoric was probably poorly chosen, but it’s been an interesting five years. There have been more laughs than I can remember, a few tears, and more than once I’ve managed to flood the cellar. Oh, and I drilled a hole in the water pipes once when trying to mount a speaker on the wall. Six hours that leaked before I realised there was a puddle in the middle of the bar.

Rarely a day goes by when something interesting or amusing doesn’t happen, and so we find ourselves sitting here on our fifth anniversary a bit agog. We haven’t made any arrangements for the day, because we forgot it was arriving!

So, instead, why not join us for a drink this evening to celebrate? We might even get flamboyant and put some peanuts on the bar…

Mark J Daniels Licensee / Partner – The Tharp Arms

*my history really isn’t that good; this data was taken from on-this-day.com